Question 1

The verb stoken usually means to heat a house or light a fire. How does it mean "stirs up trouble" here?

Accepted Answer

In Dutch, stoken literally means to fuel a fire. Metaphorically, it is used to mean "fanning the flames" of conflict, sowing discord, or instigating trouble between people. You will often see a troublemaker referred to as an onruststoker.

Question 2

Why does the sentence start with Het is when buurman is a de-word? Shouldn't the pronoun match?

Accepted Answer

This is a cleft sentence, which is a structure used to emphasize a specific part of a sentence (it was the neighbor who did it, not someone else). Just like in English, Dutch uses a fixed, neutral dummy subject to introduce this structure: Het is... ("It is..."). The pronoun het does not change to match the gender of the noun that follows.

Question 3

How does the word schijnheilige break down?

Accepted Answer

It is a compound of schijn (appearance, illusion, or fake) and heilig (holy, saintly). A schijnheilig person is someone who puts on a "fake holy" appearance—a hypocrite! The -e on the end is simply the standard adjective inflection because it comes before the noun buurman.

Question 4

Why do we use die for "who" instead of wie?

Accepted Answer

A very common trap for English speakers is wanting to use wie as a direct translation for "who" in relative clauses. In Dutch, you must use die to refer back to any de-word, even if it is a person. You only use wie as a relative pronoun when it directly follows a preposition (for example: de buurman met wie ik sprak - the neighbor with whom I spoke).

Het is de schijnheilige buurman die stookt.

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